Sankarapadu
  anti-caste home
My great-grandfather came from the jungles of Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh. His name was Venkataswami. As far as I know neither he nor any of his forefathers had a surname. Later, when he came in contact with society outside the jungle and needed to take a surname, he and his clan called themselves Khambhams--people from the Khammam district.

Venkataswami's clan lived on roots, fruits, leaves, and anything they could hunt or snare or catch, including rats and insects. They would also clear a patch of earth in the forest from time to time and try to grow something in it. They would burn the trees they cut down and use their ashes to fertilize the soil. They had no plows so they worked the patch with sticks. The first year the crop would be good, the second year it would be poor, and after that the patch of earth would stop yielding altogether. They would have to move to nother place and clear a new patch, which is why this type of agriculture is called shifting cultivation.

But Venkataswami and his clan depended mainly on what they could gather rather than on what they produced. Because of this, even the slightest unfavorable change in conditions would threaten their survival.

This may sound like an ancient way of life but even today more than eight percent of people in India still live like that. They're called tribals. There are hundreds of tribes all over the country but they're concentrated in what's called the tribal belt, which stretches in a huge U-shape from the Himalayas in the northwest all the way down to Maharashtra, across central India to Andhra Pradesh, and up through the Seven Sisters (the seven northeastern states with a majority tribal population) to Bangladesh. Each tribe has its own language, though none of them are officially recognized. Many of these languages have no script.

Tribals are not Hindus. Since they're outside the caste system, when Hindus come in contact with them they treat them as outcastes--untouchables. Anyone who is not a caste Hindu is technically an untouchable, but there are powerful non-Hindu communities like Syrian Christians, Jains, Jews, and Parsis who are nevertheless treated as upper caste. But the primitive, landless tribals get lumped in with the Hindu outcastes.

Tribals resisted British military and commercial incursions into their lands. Even today there are continual revolts in tribal areas against Hindu landlords and moneylenders, as well as against the repressive and venal Forest Department.

When Venkataswami was a young man, Andhra Pradesh faced one of the worst fmines ever known there, which came to be called
Dokkala Karuvu. Karuvu means famine and dokkalu, ribs. The victims were mere skeletons covered with skin whose ribs could easily be counted. They were so hungry they ate poisonous roots and mango pits.

Venkataswami's clan could no longer depend on what the forest could provide. They had to look for food elsewhere. So Venkataswami took his wife Rahelamma and his seven sons, including one newborn, and went out onto the plains. They set out eastward, walking in the direction of the sea, towards the coastal districts. Rahelamma carried her newborn son in her saree and the next youngest, Prasanna Rao, on her hip. She had all their belongings in s small bundle on her head. Venkataswami carried two other young sons, Gollayya and Venkataratnam, on his shoulders.

As they walked towards the coast, people told them of an enormous lake whose shores crawled with snails. If nothing else they could fill their bellies with snails. There were also fish in the lake, they were told, and growing in the grass around it was a strange edible weed. Thousands of birds migrated to the lake seasonally.

Venkataswami's family walked all the way, one hundred and fifty kilometers, to this wild, unused lake called Kollayru in the interior of the Krishna district. There they found the snails, the fish, the grass, and the birds. And the great clear lake spreading out before them.

But they also found milllions and millions of large mosquitoes that swarmed around their heads so thickly it made them look like strange walking trees. The grass was tangled with poisonous snakes. The mud sucked their feet in at every step. The grass was thick and tall and taller than they were. Leeches clung to their arms and legs. The nights screamed with the noise of a thousand different kinds of insects. There was no sign of human habitation as far as they could see.

They decided to settle there nevertheless and live on what the lake offered. By and by the rest of their tribal clan, following them, migrated to the lake. Scores of them died of cholera and malaria and snake-bite, but those who survived founded a village. They named it Sankarapadu after the ascetic god Shiva Sankarudu, the god of the ashes.

The villagers, who in the forst had just begun to learn how to cultivate food, were thrown back to primitive food-gathering. Some collected snails, some killed birds, some pickled edible weeds from the grass. They shared everything. In the middle of the village there was a fish pond. So as not to deplete the fish, they established a special day on which one man from each family would get together there and fish. When they had caught enough for the whole village, they put all the fish in a pile and divided them equally among all the families.

The land around the lake was fertile but because of the mosquitoes, snakes, cholera, and other hazards no one had ever settled nearby. When the villagers of Sankarapadu, who had settled there out of desperation, gradually started planting rice, the virgin soil gave them back plenty. Water is scarce in many parts of India and most famines are due to dry spells, but in Sankarapadu, with its lake, there was plenty of water. Since the land was abundant and no one had ever claimed ownership before, each family took as much as they could work on and marked it off with little stones. The tribals who settled in Sankarapadu were the ones who cultivated the land that had been spurned by the upper castes.

page 2: As soon as word got around, the local zamindar sent his agents to collect taxes from them.